While things like XS4ALL and CCC have their roots in the political movements that the nice man seems to care about, I don't think the Hackspaces do. I suspect that while you could talk about 'the hackspace movement' in a usefully abstract and arm-wavy sense, attempting to nail a cohesive political ideology to the set of them would be a complete waste of time.

In effect, they're more autonomous/anarchic than bloke is comfortable with and he is now waving his stick at the terrible people who've thought for themselves and rejected his authority.

On the other hand, a hackspace table at the next anarchist bookfair would be an interesting thing. Well, for values of 'interesting' that tend toward 'car crash'.

Yes - I think there is a clear 'hackspace movement', with something of an ideology, but it really isn't a political one.

Poetically, it really is about seizing the means of production in a very concrete way, and probably does more in that direction than a lot of political movements. I'm all in favour of 'tiny geeky workshop paradises'.

He's right about the gender balance, though. That continues to trouble me.

I'm watching the formation of a local hackspace at the moment; it's something I feel could be useful, but it seems to be being undermined by some arrant stupidity by one of the louder founding wannabes. I've already been told I don't know what I'm talking about in the definition of hacking (he clearly prefers the tabloid def and quotes wikipedia on it) and much the same in discussing embedded programming languages (complete with demands for citations). Well, perhaps I'll not bother - and go back to making things out of metals, microcontrollers and the like while earning my salary as an embedded software engineer... Their loss, given the skills they reckon they'd like to learn.

If that's what someone who is fairly thick-skinned concludes, then I wouldn't be surprised to see the same pattern repeated for others, regardless of gender.